


Sleep

by Gray_Days



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-03
Updated: 2013-01-03
Packaged: 2017-11-23 12:12:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/622002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A study.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep

Die doesn't sleep much. He hasn't for years.

They all have their own well-appointed bedrooms in the mansion, each with its own well-appointed bathroom and well-appointed closet, but he doesn't use his to sleep in. He spends most of his time there when he can, when he's not needed and the quiet timelines are too dangerous to hide in, and he pricks himself and draws on the walls and the floors and the curtains in his own blood, because it's calming and it keeps him awake. There's more blood soaked into the walls in years and years and years of staying awake than has ever been inside his body all at one time.

Sometimes a hypnagogic jerk startles him from a half-dreaming doze and he finds the walls of his room untouched, smooth and green. He wonders if any of it really happened, if his memories belong to another reality or a waking dream or whether, if he digs and scrapes and peels away the smooth green wallpaper and gouges deep enough into plaster and wood, all the blood he pressed into the walls will come pouring out.

Sometimes it's no longer enough and that's when he takes to wandering the mansion until he finds a place where he can lie where he falls. The others leave him alone for the most part. He's weird and obsessed and uncomfortable and he stares like he's not sure whether they're real.

He dreams.

He doesn't always remember the nightmares but they're tangles of dark, dark whispering in his head, soft tentacles and beaks and scales and feathers brushing against the raw edges of his mind and digging in, and mixed in with the dark whispers are memories and dreams of other realities, of bodies, of all the ways they've died again and again and their deaths undone just as easily as breathing until he can't tell which are dreams and which are memories and whether it really makes a difference in the end.

He stopped waking up screaming long ago. Now he just shivers awake in the dark, his jaw aching and bleeding where he bit through his cheek or tongue and his bladder curled tight, and he wonders bitterly what he'll be needed for next and whether it will mean anything at all.

 

\--

Doze doesn't mind sleeping. He doesn't mind much of anything. He does what he's told (slowly) and he isn't told to do much because there are other people for that, people who can do the same job better and faster and who don't need to be waited on to finish.

He just wishes he had more time.

Everything goes by so quickly, and the others seem to be able to get so much more done, so much more out of a single day. Itchy has as much time as he wants and he barely even sleeps anyway, and Crowbar's so efficient that even without any time powers he gets things done in a way Doze wishes he could imitate. Doze is just slow on the uptake, slow to react, and slow to execute, and it seems like everyone's always finishing their jobs while Doze is still trying to understand what he has to do for his.

He just thinks, if he didn't have to sleep, he could maybe catch up.

 

\--

Crowbar sleeps like a soldier or a murderer, in deep snatches whenever he can, transmuting immediately into hyperalertness with his hand already on his weapon whenever there's a noise or a change in the air.

 

\--

Stitch sleeps lightly in a cot at the back of his boutique, always waiting to be jarred out of sleep by an emergency. He's been a sawbones his whole life and old habits haven't changed, though he uses a needle a lot more these days and a scalpel a lot less. He's used to being needed at any time of the day or night; he's prepared for that. It's all old hat once you've been pulling out bullets at midnight for decades and the patients passing over your table have become as faceless as effigies.

 

\--

Snowman actually makes use of her bed. She doesn't actually need to sleep, being one with the universe itself, but it's a luxury she likes to take advantage of. It's not just the shutting off of the constant awareness of [everything everywhere]. She enjoys waking up drowsy and wrapped in her own warmth under the covers, and she enjoys having the others wait on her because she can. After all, who's going to stop her?

 

\--

Clover delights in having an alarm clock that he never needs to use. After all, how could the luckiest person in the world oversleep? That wouldn't be very lucky at all, would it! No, Clover is sure wake up just when he needs to, and having had an excellent night's rest and wonderfully sweet dreams besides! What falls but doesn't break, and breaks but doesn't fall? Not Clover, that's for sure! Hee hee hee!


End file.
